News For Wombats

Qualifying the praise of outsiders

At Daily Nous, Justin writes in praise of the outsider perspective. He quotes William Lycan:

An outsider to a small subliterature is more likely than is an insider to make an interesting or even important contribution to it. And the same for an outsider to a whole problematic within an area of philosophy. And possibly the same for an outsider to a whole area.

This resonates with me. As a philosopher of science, I ended up with a research program in the philosophy of music because my perspective on problems cast an interested light on questions beyond science. That said, here are some cautionary remarks about the outsider perspective— running roughly in order from the least serious to the most fundamental.

A different red jacket, a different black shirt

My picture on the department website was five years old, so I had a new one taken.

Hair: Shorter.¹

Glasses: Bigger.²

Departmental photo of P.D. Magnus (2019)

Departmental photo of P.D. Magnus (2024)

Labour-squandering technology

Australian regulators sponsored a test using generative AI to summarize documents. The soft-spoken conclusion was that “AI outputs could potentially create more work… due to the need to fact check outputs, or because the original source material actually presented information better.”

Coverage of the study leads with the headline: AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information

The strangeness of the living present

Via the Otus Shrine, I came across this new illustration by Erol Otus which depicts the guitarist Tom Morello jamming out with monsters not of this Earth. It was commissioned by Morello’s friend Dan B. Weiss as a gift for Morello’s 60th-birthday. Appropriately, it distorts my sense of time in a way that feels impossible.

AV Undercover lives!

On YouTube, I stumbled across “We’re just GWAR” a campy parody of “I’m just Ken.” The video mentions, just at the beginning, that it’s the return of A.V. Undercover.

The show was on what I can now call a 7 year hiatus, but which looked during that interval like an ignominious demise. A handful of the videos were posted to YouTube by other people, but most of them were gone.

As part of the reboot, they’ve reposted the archives. So the Dirty Dozen Brass Band’s awesome cover of “Debra”, which seemed like it was lost to time, is also back.

Goodbye, Robert

Today I attended the memorial service for my late colleague Robert Meyers, who passed away last week.

His philosophical writing addressed epistemology and pragmatism, among other things. His work on Peirce and James contains insights that informed my own work.

When I interviewed for the job here at Albany, I had breakfast with another of the faculty on the morning before my flight back to Maine. Robert met us in the parking lot to give me copies of several papers that we’d discussed, and he said he hoped to be seeing me in the Fall.¹ I had to wait for the department’s decision to make me an offer, of course, but it was a welcome positive sign.

Parrot progress

Emily Bender famously coined the phrase stochastic parrot to describe text-only chatbots. The trend towards parrots continutes: Ars Technica has a clip of a ChatGPT-4o test run where the bot, which has a canned voice it is supposed to use, replies in the user’s own voice.

OpenAI promises that the actual release version totally doesn’t do this.¹

Measuring influence today

At The Splintered Mind, Eric Schwitzgebel updates his “rough measure of current influence in … ‘mainstream Anglophone philosophy’.” The method is to count the number of distinct Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles in which the philosopher is cited.

When he ran the number five years ago, I defined the Putnam as a unit of influence: By definition, 1 Putnam of influence means being cited in as many articles as Hilary Putnam.¹

The news: My influence has increased from 77 to 89 milliPutnams.²

AI problem solving, a snapshot

I ask Copilot: “A man and a goat are on one side of the river. They have a boat. How can they go across?”

It replies: “The man takes the goat across the river first, leaving the goat on the other side. Then he returns alone to get the boat and brings it back to the original side. Finally, he takes the goat across the river again. 🚣‍♂️🐐”

Finishing with relevant emoji is very much on-brand for Copilot. In ability to find relevant emoji, it is a match for any human.

A snippet about covers

It’s hard to believe July is almost over! A couple of weeks ago I was in Santa Fe for the Rocky Mountain ASA. It was my first aesthetics conference ever. That felt a bit awkward since I’ve been actively doing philosophy of art for more than fifteen years, but everyone was super-welcoming. It was a great conference.

Today I was editing the remarks I delivered there and ended up cutting several paragraphs. I took them out because they don’t need to be in the paper, but I think they’re correct nevertheless. So here they are…